Bank to allow customers to deposit checks via iPhone

The New York Times is reporting that USAA, a privately held bank and insurance company, plans to update its iPhone application this week to introduce the check deposit feature, which requires a customer to photograph both sides of the check with the phone’s camera.

“We’re essentially taking an image of the check, and once you hit the send button, that image is going into our deposit-taking system as any other check would,” said Wayne Peacock, a USAA executive vice president.

Banking is one area where mobile has really taken off. For example, Bank of America, which has an iPhone app, has more than three million mobile banking customers, and 43 percent of them bank with an iPhone or iPod touch, said Tara A. Burke, a company spokeswoman.

Apple censors English dictionary

As an admitted Apple fanboy, even I am getting pretty tired of Apple's incomprehensible and puritanical method of approving/disapproving iPhone applications for its iTunes Store. Enough already, as they are now censoring the English Dictionary! According to Ninjawords developer,Phil Crosby, via TGDaily, Apple rejected the application only two days after it was submitted.

"We were rejected for objectionable content. They provided screenshots of the words 's***' and 'f***' showing up in our dictionary's search results," Crosby told Fireball's John Gruber. "What's interesting is that we spent a good deal of time making it so that you must type vulgar words in their entirety, and only then will we show you suggestions in the search results. For instance, if you type 'fuc,' you will not see 'f***' as a suggestion."

The application was rejected two more times before:

"Someone from Apple called to say we were being rejected again for illicit content, and no matter what we did to our dictionary, it will have to be 17+ to make it to the App Store. We gave in and said fine, hoping that we could get on the App Store immediately since the solution to their rejection was a simple metadata change. However, the App Store reviewer would have none of that. We would have to resubmit an entirely new binary and get to the back of the queue before they would look at it again," said Crosby.

A very edited version was finally approved for sale last week.

Are eBooks Apple's next frontier?

Having sold more than 6 billion songs to date, the iTunes Store has revolutionized the music industry. It also turned mobile software into a goldmine via the iPhone’s App Store, which recently surpassed 1.5 billion downloads. Apple has yet to enter the e-book market, but it is a short hop from music and software to literature. eBook downloads is the obvious next step for the entertainment mogul Apple has become. Lookout Amazon. To quote Wired:

"What can Apple do better with e-books? For textbooks or anthologies, Apple can give iTunes users the ability to download individual chapters, priced between a few cents to a few bucks each. It would be similar to how you can currently download individual song tracks from an album. It might even have the same earthshaking potential to transform an entire industry by refocusing it on the content people actually want instead of the bundles that publishers want them to buy. (Of course, Apple would likely offer the à-la-carte purchase model in addition to the option to purchase the entire book as one download — a more attractive option for shorter works such as novels.)"

"College students would love this: Teachers rarely assign an entire textbook, so they would save hundreds of dollars by downloading only a few chapters of each textbook. Apple is already popular in the education sector, so here’s even more money to milk from students, with the textbook industry worth an estimated $9.8 billion."

"Sci-fi fans might only want one story from an anthology, or a historical researcher might target certain subjects. All Apple has to do to secure the book publishers’ enthusiastic cooperation is to offer them a generous cut of the revenues, like the 70 percent it currently offers app developers."

When Wired asked students about their interest in Amazon’s large-format Kindle DX reader. Several of them said they couldn’t imagine ditching textbooks for a Kindle DX, foreseeing challenges with tasks such as notetaking, highlighting and switching between books while writing essays.

If its interface and capabilities are anything like the iPhone’s, a touchscreen tablet would make these student-oriented tasks as easy as a few swipes and taps — far more pleasant than clunking around with the Kindle’s cheap buttons and sluggish interface. Also, students would be able to type their papers on the tablet.

Finally, an Apple tablet would have color, making it better for displaying magazine pages, which could also be purchased through the iTunes Store. It wouldn’t be saddled with a slow e-ink screen, so it could display video and browse the web.

More from Wired:

"Let’s not forget to mention the multitude of other tasks an Apple tablet will likely be able to perform if developers decide to code applications for it. Think along the lines of an interactive remote control to enhance the movie-viewing experience on your TV, or a music video player to accompany the tunes blasting from your stereo. Or, heck, even an album-cover display screen for you to gaze at while listening to music. (For more on an Apple tablet’s advantages versus current e-book readers, see Dylan Tweney’s story “Large-Screen Kindle Won’t Mean Squat if Apple Tablet Arrives.”

The market for Apple here is huge. The challenge lies in establishing the right partnerships. If Apple weaves e-books into the iTunes Store, will book publishers hop on board? Given Apple’s success in numbers, probably.

Apple releases iPhone OS 3.1 Beta

Just a week after the release of iPhone 3.0, Apple is delivering bug fixes and much needed updates.

Users will find that the beta updates gives the iPhone OS 3.1 tactile feedback (a vibrate function) when icons are moved, Bluetooth compatible voice control, paste capabilities when utilizing the dialer application, which will now also convert alphanumeric numbers into regular numbers after they are pasted, and a “Save a Copy” option to the video editing feature. The new update also delivers an update to the modem firmware (version 5.08.01).

AT&T customers will also be happy to find the MMS button, though it has not been determined whether or not this will signal the start of the carrier actually providing this service.

Developers will notice improvements to Quartz and OpenGL. The OpenGL update will allow for games with more elaborate graphics to be played aside from applications. Video editing will be available to third party applications via a Video Editor Controller API.

Undetermined is whether or not this update fixes the overheating issue that many users have reported.

Found at TG Daily

Research: A third of people want an iPhone - and more!

More than a third of phone owners who don’t already own an Apple iPhone are thinking about getting one. According to research from Crowd Science, 38 per cent of people who own non-Apple phone say they will "probably" or "definitely" switch to an iPhone upon their next purchase.

In comparison, only 14 per cent of non-BlackBerry users are thinking that their next phone will be a BlackBerry, reports Internet News. The Crowd Science research found that 82 per cent of the iPhone users it polled were loyal to the iPhone brand. Of the people who were questioned, one in every three owned an iPhone.

The study said that: "Virtually all iPhone owners, 97 per cent, would recommend an iPhone to someone else, and 82 per cent would buy another iPhone. Furthermore, almost six in ten iPhone users agree they would buy Apple products over other brands if given the choice."

iPhone Apps Demo Site

At iPhoneAppDemos.tv you can view demos and instructions for dozens of Apple iPhone applications. The videos talk you through the basic steps of how to use an app on your iPhone or iPod Touch. Each video is clickable, so make sure you rollover and click on the features of each app to learn more info about how the app works.

500 million iPhone apps downloaded. 15,000 apps available.

This just popped up on the Apple website. That is since July, 2008. Amazing.

Apple to Open up Fairplay DRM

In a move with great positive implications for audiobooks, Apple plans to open up protected music and movies content bought from the iTunes Store. The iPod maker is expected to make two announcements, possibly as early as this week - the first will be to allow streaming of protected AAC content via USB; the second will be to licence its Fairplay DRM to the company’s Made For iPod licencees. The news comes from one a long-term and reliable contact who just happens to be a Made For iPod licencee. This will have the effect of enabling you to play songs bought from the iTunes Store through third party devices like hi-fis using digital connections. It may also mean that devices like iPod docks will be able to display more information - artwork and other track info, for example - which is stored alongside the protected audio.

FairPlay is a digital rights management (DRM) technology created by Apple Inc., built in to the QuickTime multimedia technology and used by the iPod, iTunes, and the iTunes Store. Every file bought from the iTunes Store with iTunes is encoded with FairPlay. It digitally encrypts AAC audio files and prevents users from playing these files on unauthorized computers.

From:Medialooks